2 Theodore
Theodore
I was the first to arrive on the ship. I’d slipped from the palace before Halla and my council and courtiers, then into the stables. I made my guards ride ten lengths behind so I might have at least the illusion of solitude.
Now my stateroom door was locked, the curtain drawn over the Siren in the stained-glass window, and I carefully unfolded one of the books I’d stolen from the hermitess. Its oil paper and linen wrappings unfurled over the table, offering up its flaking, silvered title.
A New Age of Terrible Magic
After being forced to read The Greatest Leucosians in my school years, I’d determined to avoid the Great God Jesop’s works altogether.
They were painfully dry, overlong, and oddly self-aggrandizing, and now I’d filched a slew of them and had not stopped reading since I’d learned that Imogen had left.
I pressed my fists into the table, on either side of the book, and glared at it.
At the cracked brown leather and yellowing paper. I’d torn strips of parchment and tucked them between the pages that seemed like they might be of some use. I’d marked the particularly vile and horrific passages too.
Terrible magic.
The title stuck with me like a deep-set thorn. For it was just that: terrible. Everything I’d read in these pages—every spell and its result, every caster and recipient of its power—had been weakened or marred or mutilated by it.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, fighting to banish the image of Imogen during the severing ritual, hardly breathing, black blood dripping from her eyes like tar. I flipped open the cover, which crackled in protest, and turned the pages to where I’d left off.
There is much to discuss regarding the cost of spell work.
I have learned that the eyes will go white: the cost of expanding one’s sight.
The scalp will burn from the root and release its hair: the cost of transcending time.
If flesh is not consumed—the smallest bit will apparently do—the body of the Mage will begin to eat its own.
We see this in the story of the First Mage, where she managed to replenish her badly depleted body by consuming the body of another.
Breaths rough, I lifted the book. I paced toward the wall of windows aft of the ship, and then, as if pulled to it, I looked to the water below me.
Dark today, and furious. The wind coaxed its surface into a frantic dance.
It urged a curling mist over its peaks, and I found myself waiting there, breathless, like she might appear out of its chaos.
Fully wrought. Merciless, and lovely, and whole.
I gripped the damned book tighter and read on.
A Mage will tell you that the only way to ease magic’s impact is through balance.
Flesh replaces flesh. Blood replaces blood.
Only a caster can undo their own spell. Though one cannot help but wonder what sort of influence the Gods’ power might have over magic.
For there is only so much otherworldly sway in this archipelago, and I, with my immortal age and advanced reasoning, have come to believe that a Mage’s magic and a God’s power are two edges of the same perfectly balanced sword.
I lowered the book slowly, feeling unmoored and entirely out of my depth. I ripped a piece of parchment from my desk, tucked it into the page, and closed it. “Fucking Gods.”
Through the ship’s window, Panos Port looked like a painting bathed in afternoon sun. The docks were a tangle of spires and ropes before the roll of Varya’s resplendent green hills.
The cold knot in my chest thawed slightly as I studied the white clusters of thatched-roof houses threading through the undulating landscape.
I could picture the people there—the smell of their food, the pride they took in their thriving gardens, their determination and their joy.
I held the image of them tightly, because they’d become the only pleasant thing tethering me to my duty.
A knock rattled the stateroom door. “Your Majesty.” Eftan’s voice was clipped with loosely held anger. “Open this door.”
I firmed my jaw as I folded the book back into its wrappings and tucked it into the satchel where the rest of the books I’d stolen were safely stored.
Another knock, this time with his fist. Before I answered, I poured myself a glass of wine and hid every emotion, every piece of me, that might reveal the depth of my torment.
I swung the door open on silent hinges. “Good afternoon, Chancellor.”
Eftan stood there, broad and glowering, in his gold-threaded suit. In one heavy hand he held a burlap sack. In the other he clutched the leather folder I’d had delivered to him before I’d left the palace. He raised it up between us, forcing my gaze to it.
“Did some reading in the carriage, I see.”
Eftan flushed and pushed past me, striding toward the table. “You can’t have done this.”
My feet were rooted, my chest tightening in preparation for a row. The folder gave a crack as he threw it down on the gleaming wood. He ripped it open and spread the marriage contracts over the table, exposing every one of them like guilty secrets begging to be brought into the light.
His finger stabbed a black block of ink in the margin—one of the amendments I’d made. “You have never been this reckless… this…” Eftan stared up into my eyes with pleading fury.
He looked old. He always had, even when I had been a boy, but now he looked weary too.
Dragged down. His dark liquid eyes drooped, the cunning in them somewhat banked by exhaustion.
What little hair he still had stood on end, like he’d dragged his anxious hands through it the whole ride to the port.
He all but fell into the chair beside him. “You fool.”
I slammed my goblet to the table, sloshing the wine.
“Careful.” When I spoke again, it was with perfect control, with a practiced voice that was unfeeling, but sharply edged.
Just as he had taught me. Anything less would have him in a fit over my recklessness.
“I’ve done my duty. I’ve given the princess precisely what she asked for, and before all else, I have kept my kingdom safe. ”
He gaped at me. “Your duty?” Eftan lifted one of the contracts and squinted to read from the right margin.
“‘In addition to the marriage ceremony, the princess will be escorted to Obelia, with the king in her company, so that she might have a traditional Obelian reception in her home, among her own people.’” He looked up to me with marked suspicion.
“You mean to tell me the princess willingly gave up everything she’d been promised—a crown, a shrine to worship at, all those protections—in exchange for a party in her dear mummy’s palace?
The poor girl suffers seasickness, for the love of the bloody Gods!
And you expect me to believe she wanted to marry in a pitiful ceremony on a ship. ”
“This is what she requested, Eftan, only the Gods know why,” I said, simply. It wasn’t a lie. I swallowed past a sudden block in my throat. “There is a second point we are in the midst of negotiating. Those terms will be decided upon shortly.”
Eftan’s fist slammed to the table. “Damn your negotiations—this is a half marriage! If you do not bind yourself, if your blood does not mix, the princess will not be Varya’s legal and rightful queen.”
“I’m aware.” I kept very still. “You’ll do well to remember that I am king. And despite the way you vie for control, you and the council have no power over me unless I compromise the kingdom’s safety.”
The look he gave was lancing. It was the sort of look that dove beneath my well-crafted facade.
But over all these years, I had grown more protective layers than I think Eftan—or I—realized.
I’d crafted them so expertly that a part of me was still in shock over the way Imogen had managed to breach them so thoroughly.
He gave an impressed, if angry, chuckle.
“Well done, I must say. You’ve decided that these amendments will be your little act of rebellion, haven’t you?
Your way of keeping an opening in your life for the woman that you’ve come to love.
” His look hardened. “I’ll warn you, though, no matter how you try to make a space for her, she will never fit. ”
Nerves shot through my stomach, but I mastered myself. “These amendments,” I said, “are how I will keep my kingdom safe from an alliance with Obelia that I cannot fully trust, now that I know who they worship. The princess is content. There will be no war. So I cannot parse your objection.”
His face stretched with incredulity. “You will not fool me into believing that you did this for the kingdom!”
“Everything I do is for the Godsdamned kingdom, and you are toeing treason to suggest otherwise, Chancellor.” That made him still. “What was it you always said to my father, Eftan? There is no devotion so rapturous as the devotion between a king and his crown.”
Eftan’s mouth flattened as he cast his gaze down.
As if in apology, he swiped a caress over one of the contracts.
“I said it to your father often, and little good it did.” Disappointment lowered his voice.
“It’s a shame to see that you have jumped from your bright and promising path to follow his instead. ”
And this was our impasse: Eftan’s belief that I had fallen into the very same compromising position that my father had with his lover, and that because of Imogen and how I’d grieved for her, I was no longer fit to rule.
After she’d taken the severing draught, I’d spent every waking moment at her side. Through the days and night, I’d wiped the thick black blood from her eyes and nose and mouth myself. I’d poured my power into her and counted her breaths as they struggled to fill her chest.